Impending Newton Y2K10 apocalypse narrowly averted

A dedicated Newton fan and hacker has developed a patch for Apple's long since …

Make fun of Apple's Newton MessagePad all you want, but the proto-PDA introduced by Apple in the early 90s managed to gather some rather tenacious followers. Current users of the then-revolutionary, now-exceedingly-bulky personal digital assistants were afraid that a date handling bug would render the devices useless beginning early next year. However, fear no more: a developer has come to the rescue with a patch for the Newton's OS that lets the device handle dates in 2010 and beyond.

The problem is similar to the dreaded Y2K problem that many computers faced in the late 90s (we'll take this chance to gloat that Macs never had this problem). Dates were essentially encoded using only the last two digits of the year, so computers would start reporting the year as 1900 instead of 2000 after New Year's Eve, 1999. While the impending implosion of life as we knew it never happened, lots of time and money went in to fixing the problem so that our increasingly computer-controlled life would continue without fail.

The problem for the Newton, however, is that the date was encoded using only 30 bits instead of a full 32 bits, meaning that disaster would strike when the clock struck 6:48:31pm on January 5, 2010. Naturally, Newton aficionados were ruing the day they might be forced to buy a portable device produced within the last decade.

However, indomitable Newton hacker Eckhart K�ppen developed a patch for the Newton OS which changes the time base used to calculate the real time to make sure the resulting value always falls in a safe range. The patch currently works on the US version of the MessagePad 2100 running Newton OS 2.1. Though K�ppen warns that the patch is provided without warranty, he says it has been successfully tested by several people. Fixes for German and eMate versions are in the works. K�ppen has posted the patch to his repository of mostly Newton-based open source software, along with a detailed explanation of the problem and the solution.

If you are the sort of person who would just as soon have your Newton pried from your cold, dead hand, K�ppen's solution should keep your trusty device in operating condition at least until you or your Newton biodegrades—whichever comes first. I wonder if Scott Campbell would trade his iPhone for a Newton for a week...